Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

The cabin should be small. It must provide protection from the elements, but it must not be comfortable, for if it is comfortable, the digger who has retreated to it for shelter from the heat of the summer sun or the stinging bite of winter’s icy blasts may be unwilling to leave it and return to the work, which is tiring and tiresome; or, having in his cozy cabin a place to think, he may conclude that he’s a lonely mite in a world that cares not one whit what becomes of him and fall into inconsolable despair, making him emotionally incapable of returning to the work or, finding the cabin such a comfy place to relax, he may invite women aboard, and they will probably distract him from the work; and this is a boat that is made for work.

There should be a hold, where the clams can be put out of the summer sun so that they don’t get steamed before they reach the table. The hold isn’t strictly required, though; the captain of a very small clam boat (who is captain and crew in one handy package), having no hold, is likely to keep the clams cool by throwing buckets of bay water over them now and then.

The simplest way to provide the essentials of a clam boat is to build a scow, a rectangular flat-bottomed boat with sloping ends. (See Figures 1 and 2, following this chapter.) Add a shack as a cabin, and you’ve got a clam boat. It’s not hard to build such a boat, nor is it expensive. A person can build one of these clam boats in his back yard, and many have. You could. It does the job, and it’s cheap, but it’s a graceless thing. Even if the builder gives the various rectangles the classic proportions of the golden section, the result is still a stack of boxes.

There is no need for a clam boat to be beautiful, yet some are. If you had visited Babbington when I was a boy, you would have seen some clam boats different from those boxy utilitarian scows, a curvaceous bunch of boats, curvy not because someone thought that curves would make them beautiful or sexy, but because they had originally been designed to sail. Arcinella was one of these. (See Figures 3 and 4, following Figures 1 and 2.)

If a clam boat can be said to be beautiful, Arcinella was a beauty, though she was no longer young. She had a past, which we knew, or thought we knew, from Captain Mac. Long ago, she had been under sail, a working boat, carrying goods from one town on Bolotomy Bay to another, but when sail gave way to power, and shipping by water gave way to shipping overland, Arcinella was abandoned, a casualty of progress. She spent the war years in a shallow backwater of the Bolotomy River, anonymously settling into the muck, and when Captain Mac’s father found her she was well on her way to becoming a rotting hulk. He bought her for next to nothing and transformed her from sail to power, from shipping to clamming. He pulled her from the water, and in Leech’s Boat Yard he removed her mast and rigging, cut her keel down and rebuilt her bottom to give her a very shallow draft so that she could float in the shoals of the bay’s clam flats without scraping her hull. He installed a six-cylinder engine from a 1946 Studebaker Champion, driving her prop through the first and reverse gears of the car’s transmission. According to Captain Mac, his father had undertaken the project with the intention of selling Arcinella, but when he looked her over and saw what he had wrought, he was struck by the beauty of her, seduced by the beauty of her. Stripped down, without her mast and rigging, the lines of her hull and the gentle curve of her gunwales showed to better advantage than ever before. She was sturdy and stable, broad in the beam, solid but graceful, a beauty. The Galatea effect kicked in. He kept her.

Chapter 20

Inflated by Beauty

MY DIFFICULTIES with the meanings of blow were compounded by a local Babbingtonian teenage slang term derived from it, blow up, which meant “amaze and delight” with a touch of “impress.” Something that blew one up came unexpectedly, brought pleasure, and affected one strongly enough to make one expect that it would leave a lasting memory.

Variations emerged, as you would expect. Inflate became a more elegant, learned, and formal synonym; so, while one might say of the doo-wop tune “Trickle, Trickle” by the Videos, “that blows me up,” one might say of the duettino “Viens, Mallika,” in act one of Delibes’s Lakmé, “it inflates me,” as I did upon being asked by Dudley Beaker what I thought of it, following his playing a recording of it, to which he had required me to pay close attention.

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“I mean I liked it,” I said. I also meant, of course, that I was surprised and delighted to find that I liked it, in part because I had not expected to, but I wasn’t going to add that.

“What a curious locution,” he said, because he was not a teenage Babbingtonian.

Naturally, we came to use inflating and inflationary to describe the things that blew us up, with such elegant variations as exhibiting inflationary tendencies and exerting inflationary pressure. We used gas for the ineffable something that inflationary things filled us with, or, sometimes, hot air, which put a positive twist on an expression that our parents used disparagingly. To emphasize the action of an inflationary thing, we called it a pump or a gasser, or, sometimes, whispered, with the speaker sniggering at his own bit of wit, a blow job.

People who made a calculated effort to inflate others we called blowhards; people who